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Thursday, October 21, 2004

According to this article by Robert Scheer, the Bush Administration is preventing a CIA report concerning the terror attacks from being released until after the Presidential Election.

10/19/04 "ICH" -- "Los Angeles Times" -- It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.

"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

As Scheer correctly observes,

By law, the only legitimate reason the CIA director has for holding back such a report is national security. Yet neither Goss [Director of Central Intelligence appointee] nor McLaughlin [acting chief of the CIA] has invoked national security as an explanation for not delivering the report to Congress.

Monday, October 18, 2004

All bureaucratic structures are known to have a "downward ripple effect". What this means is that behaviour encouraged from the top spreads to the lower levels of the organization; and, converesely, behaviour discouraged or even penalized by the top management is likely to be penalized ever harsher lest it be found in the lower ranks.

In light of this, it is particularly disturbing to know that high-level military and civilian players implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal are due to be promoted.

Instead of reprimands or dismissals, one general tied to the torture and abuses at Abu Ghraib prison will probably receive a promotion and another has been recommended for a new command position. At the same time, both U.S. corporations with direct ties to the abuse scandal have been rewarded with lucrative contracts valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, want to promote Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the former commanding general of U.S. troops in Iraq, according to "senior defense officials" who spoke to the Los Angeles Times. Investigators have cited Sanchez for creating an environment that contributed to the torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.